Harrison and Apple publicist Derek Taylor had a standing joke. Whenever either of them had an idea, they would quip 'This could be the big one'. Something, written in mid-1968 on a piano in Abbey Road during a break from work on The Beatles, really did become the big one for Harrison. Hurried out as an unscheduled single, it sold only respectably, but it did its business as a vehicle for other artists, eventually acquiring more cover versions than any other Beatles number except Yesterday. No less a luminary Frank Sinatra described Something, somewhat extravagantly, as the greatest love song of the past fifty years'.

Made, after a false start on the 16th April, in five widely separated sessions, Something was for some while nearly eight minutes long, owing to an extended instrumental appendage, later removed. During this process there was plenty of time for second thoughts, and Starr and McCartney took the opportunity to add to or improved their parts. (Starr's is precisely right; McCartney's, while full of beautiful ideas, is too fussily extemporised.) This is probably the bass part which caused a disgruntled Harrison some years later to remark that he'd rather have Willie Weeks play bass for him rather than Paul McCartney.

Harrison, meanwhile, fretted over his guitar solo, in the end redoing it during the session for the album's orchestral overdubs on 15th August, even then remaining unsatisfied with the result. (Since he played the same solo, note for note, on 5th May, the problem can only have been one of guitar sound.) Conceded by Lennon to be the best song on Abbey Road, Something is the acme of Harrison's achievement as a writer. Lacking his usual bitter harmonies, it deploys a key-structure of classical grace and panoramic effect, supported by George Martin's sympathetic viola/cello countermelody and dedicated pizzicato violins through the middle eight. If McCartney wasn't jealous, he should have been.

Anthology notes:

The final solo demo recorded by George Harrison on his 26th birthday resulted in the first commitment to tape of the beautiful Something, destined for the album Abbey Road (recording spanned April to August 1969), George's first A-side composition for the Beatles when it was issued as a single that October, and hundreds of cover versions. The demo is simplicity itself: a live-in-one-take electric guitar/vocal performance that, in addition to the definitive lyric, also embraced a counter-melody verse later droped. Shortly after taping this demo George participated in a session during which Joe Cocker became the first artist - ahead of the Beatles, even - to record this major new composition; his version did not come out until November 1969, however, by which time Abbey Road and the Something single had been issued.